Discussion Questions:

1. Discussion Questions: • Children: people or works of art? • the Binewskis: is their story quintessentially American (ie. the tall tale). • Family in Geek Love? “Normal”? • Norms vs. Freaks: Does Dunn do the binary dance or avoid it? • Looking, voyeurism (jars, Miss Lick, tank) • Pregnancy

2. How is the Bahktinian carnivalesque played with here?

3. According to Katherine Weese, “Dunn's depictions of Arty and the Fabulon, with all their attention to the carnival spirit and the grotesque body, undermine a facile application of Bakhtin's writings to Geek Love, showing how carnival fails to invert norms and in fact reinforces them, especially in the arena of traditional gender relations.”

4. Dunn’s use of the carnival can be seen to function oppositionally through its very irony. Just as Bakhtin's carnival challenges binary thinking and inverts heirarchical categories, Dunn’s ironic treatment of the Binewski carnival itself--her undermining of its subversive potential--challenges the notion that carnival is in and of itself radical. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, reviewing how Bakhtin's notion of carnival has been applied to literary theory, argue that "most politically thoughtful commentators wonder, like [Terry] Eagleton, whether the `licenced release' of carnival is not simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes.[. . .] It actually makes little sense to fight out the issue of whether or not carnivals are intrinsically radical or conservative, for to do so automatically involves the false essentializing of carnivalesque transgression" (13-14).

5. Rather than the carnivalesque, some argue that Dunn traffics in the grotesque, “the unexpected yoking of elements that one does not expect to be joined: ‘Knotting the alien whole with more or less familiar parts, these creatures simultaneously invoke and repudiate our conventional, language-based categories’ (5).”

6. “By using the incongruous juxtaposition of such a bizarre family with wholly conventional nuclear and patriarchal family practices, Dunn defamiliarizes patriarchy, presenting it within a grotesque carnival world and thus heightening the shock value of the patriarchal practices she describes.”

7. Disability as power? • How can a person be an individual if he or she is likeeveryone else? What forces in an individualistic society lead to the erasure ofindividuality and the intolerance of difference?

8. Arty says, “"You're just going alongwith what they want you to do. They want those things hidden away, disguised,forgotten, because they know how much power those stumps could have" (170,emphasis in original). Al says, “"Always remember how much leverage you've got on the norms just in yourphysical presence" (151).

9. Oly says: “She talks freely to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything. My worst is all out in the open…just being visible is my biggest confession…I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault…because a creature like me has no virtues or morals. If I am good (and they assume that I am), it’s obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise” (156).

10. Arty says: We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise…the norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity” (114). • “I get glimpses of the horror or normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique” (223).

11. The Monster Story • Daniel Punday, author of “Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story”: “Recently literary and cultural criticism has come to recognize the signal importance of the body in constructing culture, and we have seen a flourishing of articles and books on representations of the body. One of the most traditional ways that a writer can explore society through the body is by telling a monster story.

12. Critics have long recognized that literary monsters serve to challenge the homogeneity of society by revealing its tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps. Contemporary theory, as well as popular culture, is clearly in sympathy with the monster’s story’s goal of revealing social disunity through bodily multiplicity. More than ever we are aware of our bodies as constructions dependent upon technology and social expectation. The popularity within literary criticism of Donna Haraway’s claim that we are all ‘cyborgs’ existing within and constructed by many different information circuits is only a reflection of the larger social interest in images of the synthetic, heterogeneous body” (803).

13. The modern novel explores the body precisely through the desire for revelation and disclosure. Before the Eighteenth Century, Foucault notes: “In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal the results of vice, folly, and unreason, as a warning [ . . . ] to erring humanity” (804). • This becomes complicated by science, though, as the body becomes an independent entity, and “loses most of its links to the broad cultural mythologies that ensure its effortless interpretation” (805).

14. “In his work Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, Leslie Fiedlerstates: "Only the true Freak challenges the conventional boundariesbetween male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large andsmall, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experienceand fantasy, fact and myth" (24). Fiedler is positing the "true freak" as the figure who exposes the constructed nature of binary identification…This is the reading that N. Katherine Hayles provides in Geek Love: "Dwarfs like Olympia challenge the distinction between adult and child and question our sense of scale;Siamese twins confound self and other; mutant forms like Arty contest boundaries between human and animal" (414)…In Geek Love, Katherine Dunn creates the binary,"freaks" and "norms," only to dissolve it by showing how people in each category can become the other or pass as the other. Furthermore, Dunn shows how the two worlds are interrelated, with "norms" doing horribly freakish things, and"freaks" being painfully normal.

15. One scholar states: • “[W]e are critical of fetishistic appropriations of disability, from tokenistic cultural representations designed to make able-bodied consumers feel good to some variants of sexual devoteeism. A novel like Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, in which the characters known as ‘Arturans’ achieve spiritual transcendence by shedding digits and limbs, either participates in or parodies the fetishistic appropriation we want to critique here.”

16. Interview with Dunn • The Freaks • Body Dysmorphia

17. Discussion Questions: • Children: people or works of art? • the Binewskis: is their story quintessentially American (ie. the tall tale). • Family in Geek Love? “Normal”? • Norms vs. Freaks: Does Dunn do the binary dance or avoid it? • Looking, voyeurism (jars, Miss Lick, tank) • Pregnancy